Greentree measures-up for Crosby Tiles

The ceramic tile company had a significant need for flexible unit-of-measure calculation within inventory management. The only offering that had all the angles covered was Greentree...

Crosby Tiles was established in Western Australia in 1922 and was the first business to merchandise ceramic tiles in Perth.

The company is widely recognised as the state’s leading ceramic tile merchant, employing around 50 staff over three metropolitan locations with agents in almost every country town.

Crosby Tiles believes the key ingredients of its success are quality, choice, exclusivity and affordability.

The business scenario
“Inventory and Systems Management are the backbone of our operations,” explains Andrew Williams, general manager at Crosby Tiles.

“As an importer with lead times of up to four months, we literally can’t afford to miss the boat.”

The need to maintain its reputation as an innovative industry leader through outstanding inventory and logistical issue resolution capability had become the business imperative.

Greentree’s Excel integration clinched the decision to migrate from the company’s incumbent system because its existing investment in large linked spreadsheets could be leveraged.

Management’s familiarity with Excel ensured they could hit the ground running, quickly capturing and analysing data to create more sophisticated reports than the previous system would allow.

Unique ability to import overseas costs improves operational efficiencies
Crosby Tiles imports the majority of its inventory from exclusive manufacturers in Italy, Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Brazil and various other parts of the world.

Williams is enthusiastic about Greentree’s Import Costing and Foreign Currency module which “fitted like hand-in-glove from an implementation perspective,” he says.

“It has radically improved the operational efficiencies in our logistics department and provided more timely and accurate information to assist in management decision making.” Integration and a single data entry point combine to automate processes by reducing paper work and improving accuracy.

Colour Selection add-on key to competitive advantage
Williams explains the challenges of having a foot in both the interior design/fashion industry (from a product selection perspective) and the building/construction industry (from a logistical perspective).

Building a new home is an emotional, challenging experience for most home owners and Crosby’s respond by understanding consumer trends and ensuring affordability and availability of high quality products.

It sounds simple enough but as Williams explains, delivery can be as short as two weeks and it can take six to 18 months from the time tiles are chosen to when building commences.

Anything can happen during this time and, he says, “overstocking as a contingency plan to cover all eventualities isn’t strategically smart and it’s also a waste of capital investment.”

Greentree’s flexible Inventory Management system integrates with the Colour Selection add-on to create Crosby Tiles’ competitive advantage.

Proactive versus reactive forecasting
Like any fashion item, a certain tile colour can become unfashionable as quickly asd it became the ‘in’ hue, and this presents a challenge for inventory management.

Due to the time delay between product selection and delivery, sales data can be misleading.

Williams says sales are more of a lagging indicator of trends and can only tell management what consumers chose six to 18 months ago.

Management required a system that would produce leading indicative data.

The customised Colour Selection add-on is designed to capture data based on selection rather than sales.

This enables management to better predict where consumer trends are heading (proactive) as opposed to examining historical sales data (reactive).

Williams states this will enable Crosby’s to get ahead of the play and source products to satisfy the changing needs of customers.

Since the Colour Selection add-on is part of and integrates with Inventory Management, the combined effect is to reduce stock over-ordering which results in a reduction in the costs associated with holding stock.

What’s more, this add-on will upgrade the current manual Colour Selection process to become fully electronic and integrated in Greentree.

“The upside of this functionality for us is endless. There is nothing in the industry that compares to it and we are very, very excited to be implementing some of its features over the coming months.”

Batch Lot Tracking will help resolve batch shade issues
Williams explains that as ceramic tiles are a naturally produced product, each batch of the same product will have subtle differences.

Often, these batch changes are unnoticeable but sometimes the variation may be large enough to warrant a separation of batches within the inventory.

Crosby’s are looking forward to implementing Greentree’s Batch Lot Tracking module which will track the serial numbers of unique lots and minimise batch shade issues.

Greentree’s integration and flexibility for customisation have been innovatively leveraged to help Crosby Tiles maintain its position as industry leader.

Management has the tools to predict changes in consumer trends based on future preference not past sales and this creates a competitive advantage over competitors.

Management now look forward to spending more progressive time on leveraging more of Greentree’s capability as the business continues to grow.

For more information

Graham Hill
1800 000 737
graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

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